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I always do it twice as big as the end product. That's enough for me. Don't make it too big because then you'll paint details that won't be visible after you've shrunk the picture.

Or, as I like to see it, any mistakes I make that are smaller than a couple of pixels won't be visible after I shrink the picture. 

It should be fairly easy for you to make two versions of the game, one for dial-up access without the movie (and without digital sound etc.), and another for us broadbanders (I love my new cable modem  )

I also like the first one better, I like the font too. The Part 1: Chapter 1: title seems to indicate your game will be nice and long. Can we expect 4 parts with 3 chapters each (or something like that) 

Ok, I made a vary simple potted plant, I inked it with a Sharpie Ultra-Fine point (which I think isn't fine enough - it kind of "bled" very fast). I scanned at 200 dpi and adjusted levels, then I also used albert's Select, Invert, Fill with black trick. 200 dpi is roughly 3 times too much resolution for this image. So...

On try 1, I resized to 30% using nearest-neighbor, which gave thinner lines but some missing points. I filled with color (just a plain color for the purpose of this example, and I didn't draw the earth either), but had to work it into the tight spots and some white spots near the lines.




On the second example, I filled the image at the 200 dpi resolution. This was actually easier than at lower resolution. Then I flattened the image and resized to 30%, this time with the standard bicubic interpolation, giving some anti-aliased look:



And I think this is much better looking than the first try. The lines look much more hand-drawn, more cartoony, which is what I'm going for

I think that's the trick - make the whole background at 3x or so the resolution, and shrink afterwards. Or is 3 times larger too much?

I then clean scans in photoshop mostly with the magic wand ( selecting the white areas, tolerance 50 - non continguous). Then I fil the selcted areas with pure white, inverse selection and fill it with pure black. (that's four mouse clicks so far )

That's a good idea! Do you do that at the final resolution, or at a higher resolution and then shrink back down (presumably using nearest-neighbor interpolation to keep the lines black)?

if it's a big drawing you should trace it or find a way to get your hands on a light box, very handy they are, put your original smudgy drawing down, put a fresh peice of paper over it, tape them down and then trace it either with ink or with pencil again and then ink the new clean one.

also paper matters, if you have absorbent paper it's just going to suck the ink out of your pen and bleed all over it. Bristol board or card stock or anything heavier than standard paper I recommend, something that won't eat the ink and make it bleed and something that won't repell the ink and make it bead.

Don't have a lightbox, no - hopefully I can get away with erasing the pencil lines?
But how do you use bristol board with a lightbox? Doesn't it block all the light?

Hi,

I just tried scanning a quickly drawn background image into photoshop to colour it, and the results were, well, not too good. I tried to follow the tutorial atÃ,  -Ã,  http://www.sylpher.com/kafka/tutorials/curves.htmÃ,  Ã, -Ã,  but my lines ended up kind of choppy.

Do you have any hints on how to draw a background that will look good once scanned and digitized? I want to avoid having to re-trace the lines in photoshop. I'm going for a cartoony look, 640x480x16 bit color.

What kind of pencil do you use for the initial sketch? What kind of pen for the inking? How thin should the lines be? And so forth.

Thanks!

I don't think the script engine supports optional arguments either, which would be needed in order for that to work.

Seems like he did have a game to show but didn't know how to show it.

If you have it, you can use Adobe Imageready to view animations. You simply define which layers are visible for each frame. It's very well integrated with photoshop so that's very useful.

Once I've got each frame I use file->Export Original to save each frame as a separate file, to later import as sprites. As far as I know you can't import an animated gif into AGS. Plus GIFs are 256 colors only, and my game is 16-bit.

Hi,

I can't find any guidelines for what types of WAV files can be played by AGS. 8/16 bits? 11 kHz and more? I have a couple of files which don't play..

Tahnks!

I can add this great resource, with 1000 audio clips of good quality:

http://slideshowresource.real.com/audio/

Did you delete a sprite that was in use? Maybe you can try disabling all the views except one to try to pinpoint the problem.

Thanks for your answer. I think what I'll do is define a few functions like:

RandomSpeak2(sp1, sp2);
RandomSpeak3(sp1, sp2, sp3);
..
RandomSpeak6(sp1, sp2, sp3, etc.);


So that way I won't have to setup an array each time. Odds are I won't need more than a few (< 10) options anyway.

Hello,

Is it possible to define a function with variable number of arguments? I want to do:

RandomSpeak(string Speech1, string Speech2, ...)
{
int ran = Random(NumberOfArguments)
//etc... display a random message from the list.
}

Thanks!

Edit: [ANSWERED] in the subject

True. Even a short MP3 music file will take up as much space as, probably, 2000 sprites or so. Probably more.

How about defining:

function DoACharge(int CharNumber)
{
if (character[EGO].x < character[CharNumber].x + 15) {
Ã,  // Blah blah blah
Ã, // Charge at EGO instead of castle
Ã, }
}

and

DoACharge(BADONE);
DoACharge(BADTWO);
etc.


If it comes up in more than one room you could put it in Global Script, or just in the Room script if that's for a single room.

It's not much more difficult, if you use layers, to make several full images for talking frames. Basically you can have one (or more) body layers, and have 4 or so head layers with different mouth shapes.

I would think there would be trouble in aligning the overlay head and the standing frame. Plus, you couldn't have the head move (like bob up and down) as that would end up showing the stationnary head behind it.

I could see this being very nice if the character changes clothes, though.

Well, as you mentionned there would be no lip movement. But a bigger problem is that since all the text in the dialog would be separated from the dialog itself, and put in the dialog_request function, you'd need a huge number of calls and it would make maintaining the dialog nearly impossible.


Edit: Never mind, I see that the Speech GUI is on CJ's to-do list already:

http://www.agsforums.com/yabb/index.php?topic=16636.0

[speech]

Hello,

I know this has been asked before, I wanted to post in:
http://www.agsforums.com/yabb/index.php?topic=15349.0
but the thread was locked.

I tried the thought bubble example in:
http://www.agsforums.com/yabb/index.php?topic=14739.0
And it works if you use DisplayThought, great. However I would like bubbles for speech, and so there are two problems:

- Lips don't move during DisplayThought.
- The dialogs don't use DisplayThought, they use DisplaySpeech (apparently).

So, is there a way to specify/customize a GUI for speech?

Indeed. In the example code given here:

http://www.digitalmindstudio.ch/script.php?id=9&lang=en

...when a click event is recorded, a dblClick variable is either 0 or 1. So your script can record double-clicks for any clicking even, be it eyes, hand or walk.