Messages

[soo-oo]

Dark.
It's all soo-oo darth dark.

Yes, pretty.
Yes, attractive.
Yes, near-perfect.

But too dark.

Yah. It's just a rabbit and a dog in police uniform.
How can two cartoon characters make so much noise?

Just go play Star Wars.
It's awesome you know, with galaxies and monsters and crap.

* totally broken now *

Damn teh cancelled games!!!1

I used BUILD engine alot, first for level editing, later I tried to add my own monsters and weapons. This is the engine behind Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, Shadow Warrior, Redneck Rampage and numerous other experiments and mods.

And It's quite easy to use, especially if you model all things in 3D and then use as 2D animations in the engine.

Most advanced build is either for Shadow Warrior or Blood, Duke's one had some problems with blocks at different height.

You need one of these games to start with, and then search net to get all tools, for graphics extraction/adding, Build level editor and so on. I'm sure you can find them.

Though, Build games won't look very good today and many people somewhat dislike them.

I like the story.
Screens look good too. Maybe a bit low on detail... but good.
Waiting...!

Well, yes.
In 3-rooms-2-characters-no-story MAGS/joke/1st game there's probably really no need for sound testing.

But taking a look at some full-length games here, I can imagine what time waste happened there during development.

WAV support could be enough, since I'm talking only about sound effects here and though I'm not sure, I still believe that any kind of sounding starts from wave format, which is standard nowadays for most sound recording utilities and also internet - where most of samples heard in games come from. And since there's so much to improve, it's quite clear that any kind of improvements go for majorities, rare cases are not that important, such as people who use OGG for everything or so.

So, WAV... which - of course may be converted to OGG or MP3 later. There's only need to test it, speed/size/quality measurements can be always done later.
Which is also very simple, since AGS doesn't care much about sound file extension. Sound3.wav, which was tested and included into a game, can be later just converted to sound3.mp3 for example, more than rebuilding VOX files there's nothing else that has to be changed in game, if I'm not mistaken. Which also rocks.

Anyway, there will be no games not coming out or being worse even if there will never be such improvement, so...
...just and idea here.

Keep his right hand more straight during center frames, people don't walk with hands bent all the time, it looks too robotic.

Same to his butt, It makes him look fat: It doesn't have to hang all the time

Anyway, fantastic walkcycle!

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.

Ah, I always loved your works, Darth.

Problem is - you're too fond of brown color, 90% of stuff I've seen is colored with tones of brown. This bg suffers under it enough to make it matter, so I...


* Brightened floor by 10%
* Added 2% of noise to floor
* Went overboard with windows above door
But these windows could cast light spots to floor in some cool way -- not sure how
* darkened by 10% beige parts of two opposite walls to reduce amount of ambient lightning

This like ultra-lazy edit, I should have darkened wooden parts of wall too and done all with care, without leaving artifacts... but I'm too tired today.
But this edit was just to check my suggestions, so I won't suggest impossible or bad thing.
There's no doubt that you can do it better.

Floor was actually only critical part to re-color, becasue otherwise everything looks too same-color <> boring and hard to tell apart.

I love this bg.
Good work... again.

No-no-no.

No Sam.
An adventure game is basically interactive and - if well made - harmonic (sp?) collection of many types of an art. Art of drawing, composing music, storywriting, combining it all...

Speech just isn't another "accessibility option" for people who can't read.
It's about playing a roles of characters. This is a type of art too, often called 'acting'

Now, adding speech is making your "harmonic collection" richer by adding a type of art, plus it adds alot to the characters and atmosphere, expressing (if it's the right word?) personalities trough voice, it's tone, tempo and so on.

Sam/any text2speech = not art, neither acting.

It sounds about like making yourself a carboard car and making face that it's real one, just because you cannot afford a real one.

But some places could use Sam well, like for talking computers, robots, etc in a game. Idea itsself is quite original.

[his]

to avoid "tricked!" page,

- Disable all kind of download accelerating software
- Erase IE history, if you're using IE - it may just happen that image with code was loaded into your machine last time you tried to get this (or any other) game and now you're getting wrong image from cache all the time
- if using firewalls, unload them
- if using proxy, disable it
- if using Kazaa, emule or any other pirating software, close them - kazaa running at the time you're trying to download - seems to trick underdogs though they're not related in any way.
- Try either pressing enter or clicking on "ok" button, it had happened that one works and other not
- ask your friend to try to get the game with his computer and then send it to you
- visit www.abandonia.com and see if you can get the game from there. Or get some of the others neat oldies up there.

hm.
Many things remind me my own style, and I like it.
Here's little review, which I hope you will find useful:

good:
* colorful
* beautiful (in artistic way)
* technique is lovely (if it were less blurry)
* attractive (make me want to wander around in a world like this)

not so good:
* blurry!
* as darth already mentioned - not usable or at least comfortable to use for a GAME
* colors are bit out of the place (sky! clouds) - too dark and weird.

suggestions:
* Tree...
- left branch needs more these massive (big) leaf groups located at right branch
- right branch needs more these small leaf groups around the big one which are at the left branch right now.
Leaves just don't grow on big branches, they come from many little sub-branches.

You have to mix big and small leaf groups and make leafy are of right branch alot longer. You need more sub-branches, becoming smaller and smaller to aquire more realistic look and your style makes it pretty easy!

I MSPainted a picture fast to give you at least some idea what I just said



See, even if you're not drawing leaves one by one and making whole leaf groups, the way you did them still gives a feeling that tree structure looks like on the picture part I labeled "wrong".
The blue circles mark these leaf groups, you should get some idea how to position them and with what size.

Tree could also use more and more densely this cool scratch-like texturing you used at some places on tree, it doesn't have to look that polished at all.

* Sky - reduce change of tone in the gradient, it goes from dark to light too rapidly. Also, consider using even lighter tones of blue

* Clouds - now this is where blur needs to be. Make clouds more transparent, longer, with smoother and alot more fluffy edges, and definetly lose or at least reduce this dark blue from clouds. I make my clouds with pure white only, with more or less transparent brushes, it works pretty well.

* Make grassy area becoming lighter as distance from player (monitor) grows... (grass getting nearer to the horizon), you should reach a look like land fading into light fog at far distance. This gives a bit more of 3D-ey look and makes whole room less flat.

* Overall - this is pretty detailed and good-looking technique. I just don't understand why are you lowering detail level with this ultrablurry & antialiased stuff. This is like a big waste of artistic skills of yours.
Just try toÃ,  make whole thing without any antialiasing, at least on outline areas, I understand that smooth textures need to be antialiased. But that doesn't stop you from keeping main shapes simple and picture details well recognizable. I hope you do understand what I just said.

good luck!

[you]

Who me?
Glass shading? Probably me then.
thanxx0rs!

Of course, you're absolutely free to learn from it, rip the edit apart, cut it, colorize it, use it in our game, draw nude women (or gay beach for example?) onto it and so on.

As with all my edits, they're personally targeted for use by person they are made for, which basically means that edit is made for you and you have all rights for it.

But be warned:

* If I say "shitty edit", I mean shitty edit. Rocks' and lighthouse shading style sticks out of it, definetly too much.

* Your pics/style was quite different. If you use it as it is, the whole room will stick out from the game.

* If you use it in game, you'd better make a great game or-- !!!

"Mikey" looks bad.

* skin color is way too red. beard & stuff can't fight its way out from so strong skin color.

*Right (his right) foot could be more faced towards the way he's facing. Feet should support more, too.

everything else looks okay to me.

oooh, didn't expect so fast and so working help!

Chris-TV (heh, teh name) - was just as automatic as I needed. It detected both country and all these one-letter-long settings by itself, I didn't have to tell it where i live!

Lot's of setuo by hand on picture quality, but that's not even worth mentioning, I'm still a game developer and setting up random stuff is everyday life or something, it was just international tv/video standards I didn't know or either give heck about.
It works-works-works!



I love you, Yoke.

[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.

heh.
It maybe aswell "Star Wars: The Jedi Adenture".

[DO]

Not yet.
1) draw. Before posting, actually DO change a background, don't just fill one box with different color or draw a tiny button to somewhere and say "updated version". This is pointless.

2) Despite very nicely drawn console, room is awfully empty. Add alot more details!

3) Red color... ugh. It may be okay with only one room, but if you're about to make whole spaceship in such "eye-killer" colors, better rethink your rooms.
Because -- one thing is wish to give players joy and excitment, another one is giving them head- and eye ache...

.D

4) Character style seems fit with room style just fine. You're on the right track here. Keep other characters in same style.

5) Work with tiny, pixelly things! The stuff on console looks good, so I guess it's your strong side. Add lots of little machinery onto floor and walls, and some wires hanging, and so on.

6) Practice - and again - practice your perspective drawing skills. Learn vanishing point system, observe 3d games and your own room in reality, just do everything to get these shapes right, because you have almost perfect perspective paintover room here, but if you don't learn the technique, other rooms will look very bad and different.

Though I tried to keep your simple-color style - starting bravely with these rocks... I failed miserably, ending up with self-made brushes and overcolorizing.Ã, 

The main problem with your final version is that grassy land is shaded - and therefore looks like - a big chunk on sharp steel!
Jus like a big green knife in the sea.

In first version, sea horizon was.... not horisontal. I remeber gettin kicked by someone (darth mandarb, probably) some time ago for making same mistake.
In final version, sea horizon is not visible at all! This may sound logical and even look pretty, but in nature, it isn't so. Google for random beach photo and see yourself.

And I just don't feel that someone would care to build a paved road to the lighthouse in the middle of nowhere.

Other things are good, pretty enjoyable bg to edit over a loo-oong time.... Looks pretty too.

So, though my edit failed,Ã,  I'll post anyway, just for ideas.

[sequel]

Guilty? Not much of a game.
Space story (which - already sounds weak) combined with bizarre limited inventory system and weird atmosphere. Too hard or nonlogical puzzles... bah.

Then again, it's sequel is lovely. Ability to play two different characters - which really act, think, feel and speak differently in all cases makes this game one of elite adventures out there.

I've seen videos of the police in Russia ... now these guys have it right.Ã,  They don't tolerate jack from anybody.Ã,  Don't do what they say after the first warning you're on the ground with their knee wrenching your neck and your arm twisted painfully behind your back.

That is true.
Ten years ago, during Soviet Union, Russian police methods were in my homeland too, (as we was part of USSR).
Fact is, people were afraid of police (then it was called militia) and all kinds of punks just tried to avoid any trouble with militia at any cost, because militia first kicked, then asked questions, not vice versa.
It just... worked, just as "cop shooter never makes it to the court alive"-untold rule that exists in many - if not most places in world today.

Shooting?
A bullet doesn't have to mean instant death. To stop a thug with a bat or knife it's enough to shoot into feet of shoulder. Shooting can be justified easily, but killing a human being needs always very good cause.

There's nothing that should be done with police and it's rights - both rights and life balances itself very well. But wages of police should be definetly higher to make police more feel that he's well rewarded for doing things right and risking his own life every day. Then there will be less bribes and "bad" cops too.