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Nice details, but
- it's quite hard to get a sense of the scale - might be improved by
   - having the haze start a bit earlier
   - the river thinning and zigzagging in the distance
   - the cliff edge not being quite so straight
- it seems like two perspectives forced together
   - perhaps if the top of the cliff curved away from the horizon on the left it would help

I just downloaded the town demo - wow, looks great!
(I don't have anything else to contribute - just thought I'd offer a word of encouragement.)

Those are pretty cool.
I can't see them all belonging to the same band though... #2 and #3 would have creative differences.
The colouring is a bit "airbrushy" on the trousers - they look quite plastic. It works for #1 and possibly #3 but the rest could do with some roughing up.
To rock them up a bit... instruments?

Those are beautiful, particularly Harry and Hermione.
Ron's trousers are a bit shapeless and his cheeks are rather pointy.
But I love what you've done with the hands. And Hermione's knees.

If you're going to do that, this is my suggestion:

Have a data repository with a path that is specified in the editor and a checkbox that says whether or not to use it. Then in the editor the sprites and backgrounds/walkable areas/regions etc have a relative path to the graphics, plus the clip rect, transparent colour/pick point, etc.
Sound and music could go in the repository too.
Finally a bake button that imports the new graphics (or a checkbox to autobake when you compile, otherwise the compile just uses the graphics on disk without importing them).

This way you can use the uncompiled game on multiple machines with different directory structures, and so on.

It might be interesting to have an option for the compiled game to use the repository (with the repository path relative to the executable or specified in the ini file) so that artists working on graphics could see them without having to know how to use AGS. One would have to be careful not to release this version to the general public though.

Is this an in-game background?
I would change the angle to something more adventure gamey - with a visible horizon.

I like the ripples in the shadow on the water.
The grass clumps are all a bit regular. I'd prefer some randomly sketched clumps.
The texture on the path is ugly - it looks more like chipboard.
The doorhandle might look better with the colours inverted.
Depending on the game style, some more details would work well - a tree, rocks in the water, bushes, posts, a sign, etc.

Don't they have stores that sell foreign food in Japan?
There are some here in Austin, and there was an English store outside Brussels.
That's where I go to get Heinz beans, proper flavoured crisps, digestive biscuits etc.

90% fat free! Why don't they just cut off the 10% that isn't free of fat?

Aah, bollocks. That's a shame!
Still, Jackie will always need people to beat up, so I'm sure your time will come.
Good luck!

I guess String.CompareTo didn't work then?

Try String.CompareTo(). I presume it's a wrapper for the C function strcmp, which returns 0 if the strings are the same, <0 if the first string should be first alphabetically, and >0 if the first string should be second alphabetically.

If that doesn't work, then the easiest thing to do is to write a function to compare the two strings letter by letter until they differ and use that instead of new>old, like this:

Code: ags

// returns the position that the strings differ + 1
// if a > b, returns a negative number
int StringSortPredicate(String a, String b)
{
   int length = a.Length;
   if (b.Length < a.Length) length = b.Length;

   int pos = 0;
   while (pos < length)
   {
      if (a.Chars[pos] < b.Chars[pos]) return -(pos+1);
      if (a.Chars[pos] > b.Chars[pos]) return pos+1;
      pos++;
   }
   // no characters differ in the first 'length' characters
   if (a.Length == b.Length) return 0; // the same
   if (a.Length > b.Length) return pos+1; // a longer than b, so later in dictionary
   return -(pos+1);
}

Bill Gates once said something to the effect of 56 MB of RAM being enough for anybody...or something like that.

Would you believe it was 640k? Bill wouldn't:
http://tafkac.org/celebrities/bill.gates/gates_memory.html

You can't reject change just because you don't necessarily fully understand it.

I presume Elliott is reticent to embrace DRM. Personally, I'm still on Win2k.

And ildu some web to see the work of Uderzo?

http://images.google.com/images?q=uderzo

Nice work! Some line thickness discrepancy around the eyes and nose...

I made the suggestions to improve the game, obviously, but this is the AGS forums, we're friendly here.

Yes we are!
Yahtzee has given a lot and I don't think there's any need to give him a hard time just because he doesn't post on these forums any more.

press "enter"

Doh! Cheers!

I like it a lot.
Good stuff!
I didn't like the respawning guards. The zombies were fine though.
It's a shame there wasn't some way to skip the text boxes, as they really slowed down the gameplay.
The boss fight wasn't very "tight" but nonetheless quite entertaining.
Looking forward to the next installment.

Well I played and beat it but after giving a big reply and offering suggestions to 5DAS and having no reponse back from Yahtzee but him adding just about every suggestion I made, I'm less than encouraged to offer a review.

Why did you make the suggestions? To get a response from Yahtzee or to to improve the game?
Were your suggestions unique? Perhaps they were common suggestions. Maybe he really doesn't read these forums. ()

Wow, that only took a month?
Fantastic game, thanks!
I look forward to what you can do with some more time!
I particularly liked the

Spoiler

proof of friendship, and the demon in the bathtub.

[close]

Perhaps Mr(s) Spiteri intends to use more than 4GB of memory in a game?

Aye, you'll be one of those fancy-schmancy UT film students, eh?

Those graphics are freakin' awesome! Beautiful style. Lovely animations too. Please finish!
I too had to use IE to download.

Unfortunately, InC, you can't get much simpler than that.
For your reformulation of the problem...

h = v*sin(angle)*t - 0.5*g*t^2     ... (1)
d = v*cos(angle)*t                        ... (2)
t = d/(v*cos(angle))
h = d*tan(angle) - 0.5*g*(d/v*cos(angle))^2
v^2 = g*d^2/[2*cos^2(angle)*(d*tan(angle) - h)]
v = d/cos(angle)*sqrt{g/[2*(d*tan(angle)-h)]}

Note that if h > d*tan(angle), it's impossible. That makes sense because the original angle isn't pointing higher than the end point.

[EDIT] I am an idiot. Fixed equations.

Finally, if you know the velocity and want the angle:

Rearranging (2) gives:
cos(angle) = d/(v*t)                            ... (A)
=> sin(angle) = sqrt(1 - (d/(v*t))^2)
Substituting into (1) gives:
h = v*sqrt(1 - (d/(v*t))^2)*t - 0.5*g*t^2
=> h = sqrt(v^2*t^2 - d^2) - 0.5*g*t^2
=> (h + 0.5*g*t^2)^2 = v^2*t^2 - d^2
This gives a quadratic equation in t^2 which can be solved and substituted back into (A) to get (angle).

fred, it's been a long time since I did dynamics at school, but I did flick through "Physics for Game Developers" and it looked like a decent book.

A quick read of the reviews on amazon suggests that "Physics Modeling for Game Programmers" is a more basic introduction. I hesitate to recommend any book that has typos though.

InC, note that I edited the solution somewhat.