Messages

[also]

Uhh... something still feels awful.

First, why did you kill colorful books on left shelf? You don't have to get extreme with colors, but also with desaturating. Try to find a good-looking balance.
Second, make this self back wall DARKER than sides. Seriously, that shelf makes my head hurt. It's so... unreal. Even if your shadows are right, composition sucks because it's like an illusion. Also, I believe that shelves with books SHOULD cast shadow onto shelf back wall and make it darker than rest. Your shadows right now may be right in terms of direct light shading, but it ignores light scatter and overall ambient light. Just turn on light in your home at night, take a look at your bookshelf and you'll notice that I'm right.

Use more colors and less contrasted colors to shade. Smoother shading. It's okay with right shelf (which looks very realistic IMO), but not so good with wall and table.

About right shelf: it's bottom and sides are paper thin! Fix it.

Table needs more colors and detail. I looks like it's made of corrugated board right now (cardboard).

Wall is awfully plain at the right middle portion of the room. Add a picture or light switch or something.

EGA-flavor super-contrasted color choice and those gigantic black outlines look worse than your shading really.
Most horrid thing is shadow-y thing around carpet and left bookshelf, which confuses me like an optical illusion... I have no clue what's going on there.

Those are your basic mistakes and do-nots.

But apart from that, this BG has some kind of oldschool appeal to it, and I like it!

Boo-ring.

Maybe I will burn in hell for this but--
http://www.heaventools.com/rt-how-to-change-version-information.htm
It is correct thing, I think?

YKnow, everyone can use Google.

Disneytized graphics.

Yuck.

there is still people actually using windows, haha, gotta laugh

...

Bittorrent is probably no. 1 tool for pirating right now.
To get most out of your torrenting, google for some client setup tips, few changed numbers in preferences go long way in means of downloading time.

[on]

I'm always misusing "ä" [æ] when speaking english. I cannot understand why there isn't a letter for this vocal.
It's everywhere!

It's first sound human being makes after being born. Babies don't cry "aeaeaeae" or "aaaaa"! It's "äää"

An apple. (äpl)
Language. (längvich)

It's there! And yet, I'm never sure if it really is.

Dance. I say "dääns". British say "daans". I'm wrong. But it feels so natural there. And I think I've heard it with my version million times in hollywood movies.

Also, lack of "ö" in whole language feels like absurd. "World". I haven't heard it pronounced like "worm".
Say those words! Hear the difference between 2 "o"-s? Or is there none?
So there's "ö" in language. But it's SO rare! In estonian, shortest word is "öö" (night). A whole word dedicated to and made of 2 same vocals!

But english... none.
Helluva strange language. I will never get over misusing those two - for me - so natural letters.

Another sick thing is using in and on correctly. I usually make (or might make) mistakes. I got sick on december or in December? My language-sense points to latter. But I'm never sure really, since I rely on sense only (as with all languages I know) and never memorize any actual grammar rules.

ALSO thing I never made clear for myself, even though I got A's on tests:

Is an animal he, she or it? If I want to speak about a cat, do I have to lift (her/his/its) tail first to decide on gender?  

Anyway, I got 90% of my initial english skills from AGI text-parser games  
I would have never learnt the language to the level I know right now without those.

Yet still, I watch every english-spoken movie with subtitles. Reading clear text is one thing, hearing bloody hero mutter with accent and over explosions... and trying to understand what he just said - is way another...

While a nuke-free world would be nice...

Would it?
I think horror of nuclear war is only thing that has kept us from WW3. Since 1945, there has been loads of reasons to start a new global war.

I see it as epic CIA fail.

Meddling with dangerous regimes and weak countries for the last century has brought USA nothing but undeserved dollars and bloodthirsty enemies.

I don't believe that nukes would fly in my lifetime though. It rather seems that countries tired of "world police" see acquiring nuclear weaponry as last chance to decide their own matters by themselves. Sorta like new arms race.

Even though I think balancing powers such as Russia or US are neccessary with all the crazies on thrones. We don't want back to middle ages, no? War is way beyond being chilvarous these days.

Coming back to admire the picture, I finally noticed the cave.

The cave... Caves are usually made of 3 different ways: collapses (random), hot air and water. I'm reading an awesome book by Hungarian speleologist right now about karst and there's whole science behind caves.

This cave you drew doesn't look to be made in any of those ways. It rather looks like it's hand-made by really crafty giant.

I cannot explain this very well or be constructive on this, but

* The left side of daylight background is my absolute favourite. It's totally great, and what makes it great are yellow flowers and high rocks. Almost like a photo.

On the other side, literally - right side of image is poor. Attention to detail and colors is incredible, of course, but everything looks like from someone who cannot draw very well. Can color and paint, but not draw realistic shapes. They are like a child drew them. That's a HEAVY contrast with left side, since left one is really realistic in it's weird way.

* Characters are okay, I guess. Your shading makes them a bit flat, and "attention to detail" is actually overdoing gradients (thus killing shading) and not much else... faces still look quite -er- functional. Not interesting or artsy, simply functional, like in every better AGS game. Pay attention to what ProgZmax said and remember that it's low res - don't try to treat it like high resolution picture. That's your main mistake... for example: if you have 13 pixels available to wrinkle clothes, you cannot cram every "realistic" wrinkle in -- it will look like horrible mess.
You have to choose only thay ONE wrinkle that REALLY has effect and pleases eye.

EDIT: fixed some typos

Blinded by the illness that is love.

I don't know if it helps or if my opinion can be taken seriously as I'm anything but unbiased right now.

I had a girlfriend. For 8 years, on and off. We are... were very different in nature, as she was very socializing and what you would call modern woman, she seeked success always, had high ambitions, spent more time going out and her career. I'm simpler, all I want is a loving wife and peaceful family.

That's why we broke up and made up constantly over last 4 years. Differences tore us apart, love brought back together. We had lots of nasty fights and evil words, but in our cores, we always loved each other and whatever flings and other friends she had, all her other tries at relationship ended with her crying and coming back to me, because if there's fate, we were meant to be together and with no one else. Nothing can replace true love. Same for me.

Few days ago, we met again. Over 3-4 months. After some talking, and discussing how our lives had progressed while we were apart, etc. Once again, we came to the point that world is pointless unless we are with each other. And we ended up in each others hands. Again, promises were made to try again, change ourselves and try to accept our differences as much as possible. We made some plans to meet again, take a trip to country and try our best to be together, since neither of us hasn't found anyone who could even come near to the way *we* feel about each other. We were supposed to meet yesterday after work, both waiting for it, sending cute "goodnight" text messages, etc.

But night before yesterday... she was killed. In her home, by unknown intruder. Someone came and stabbed her. Someone she knew.
She fought for her life, police said, as there was blood in many rooms of her apartment.

She was all I cared about in this world.

Want advice about love?
Nothing matters. Grab your love, hold it with ten fingers and never let it go. That's what I feel. What I regret not doing earlier. That's all I can think of and blame myself for.

...

DX update helped for some games. I ALWAYS use fullscreen.
Seems that newer AGS games work far better and older ones not so well.
But that's quite normal.

What I like about Win7 is clean/organized-desktop orientation... everything's like built to keep your start menu and desktop clean. And it really is. I see desktop, billion temp/download folders and 2 screenfulls of long start menu of my previous XP only in nightmares now.

For problems, explorer opens sometimes folders for a long time unless you spend some time for indexing drives.  Atleast for me it was. And bad if you have no clue that you're supposed to do it. Seen one BSOD also so far... But still times better than anything before.

Thanks, I will try this later.

Might probably solve many other problems... some non-AGS games also start up really slowly, especially ones from DX7/8 era (like Commandos 2 and Stronghold).

...don't work very well. First. They start like 2 minutes. Then, Windows 7 bitches about color schemes and disables it.  Even though I run in XP SP3 compatibility mode. But comp-modes are crappy as always.

And ingame, whenever sound is played, there's random lag of 1 second. Worst case so far, Art of Theft. DirectX 11 issue perhaps?
Any tips?

On side, note, interesting that I haven't seen any Win7 threads or mention here anywhere... Or maybe I haven't looked well enough.

I got it on for like 1,5 months already? I doubt that even CJ has tested AGS with it yet.

For AGS being Win7-ready early would be a good idea because from what I've experienced so far, Windows 7 is the 'dream windows' and best thing Microsoft has ever done so far. If anything obsoletes XP, this will. Nothing like that godawful Windows ME second-edition called Vista.

NoScript.

Basically turns your browser into heavyily defended internet fortress. You decide what internet is allowed to run and from which domains.
Kind of renders all other anti-ad plugins/extensions useless, since there's no need to block what's not coming through anyway. NS is first thing I install after fresh firefox installation. I cannot imagine surfing without it anymore.

A bit annoying to allow sites at first, but once you've gone through your usual surfing habits / locations, it's all good. Plus, browsing is considerably faster since all those additional fifteen ad/tracking/spamming sites don't slow down your favourite site anymore.

Tab Effect 2

Saw tab-effect in some weird british computer tv-program...
TE2 is in experimental stage yet, but I like it very much

And I second downloadstatusbar. Default download window is lame.

I actually think that there's more spam than actual internet already.

I use Firefox with NoScript addon.

Random wepage, I allow main domain to run scripts. Funny, but It's always at least 3-4 domains/servers that are DENIED to do this.
Putting this in simple words, I am forced to cripple my browser down to 10-20% to surf internet. "Pure" pages like adventuregamestudio.co.uk (not running any other "outer" services) are getting really rare.

Almost every damn page comes with stats.google, googlesyndication  (yeah, GOOGLE), revsci.net, atdmt, geminus.pl, doubleclick.net, and so on - ad- and stats-trackers. Those darned things slow down loading, display ads, sniff around and trace every virtual step.

What google (or anyone else) should build, was a browser that filters all this digital pile of shit and leave only pure, old good internet. This I would praise.

I don't mean so much nigerian "business offers" here but amount of reading to do overall.

But It's quite personal on my case too, over years, I grew somewhat tired of the internet. I get average of 20 e-mails a day, not counting IM, forum reading, etc.

Anything that will make "communication easier and quicker than ever" means usually simply more communication. Sounds fun and modern yeah. But imagine if it was still 1800's and you simply got all of this by snail mail. 20 letters a day?
Doesn't sound very fun, yet we're somewhat used to it electronically, and consider this normal.

I'm kind of running out of excuses to actually leave the house...

[the glorious art of spam]

I liked it at first. e-mail/im/forum. Cool?

Then i thought about how would this make a revolution in the glorious art of spam.
I don't like it so much anymore.

[does]

I kind of mentioned that.
My own style is a mix of both and it does work, but there's a bit more different approach than just softbrushing pixellated background.
This was simply an example.