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Sorry, guys, but my name is Alexis, and everyone calls me Lex. 

..now I wanna know the real names of Rex and tex too...

This is indeed hilarious 

These sketches are bloody awesome.

Thanks.

I really like the stances, they look very natural, as if you were drawing on photos.

For some sprites I actually use photos as reference, but that's not a bad thing I think. I'm happy with the outcome and I don't need as much time as I would without those. And while going through a lot of (often googled) pictures I learn a lot about anatomy and posture.

The only thing is the girl with green pants & cap standing. It seems a bit stiff. The hand's not natural and the shoulders a bit tense, fi you know what I mean.

Yep, I'm not happy with that part either. Actually hands are my main problem, it takes me a long time to get them right. Well, the sprite should be her normal standing view, I didn't really know what to do with her arms. Perhaps I'll let her put her hand in the pocket or something...

I'm drawing everything in vectors using Illustrator. Sometimes I make a sketch on paper and scan it, sometimes I use google images as references and sometimes I'm drawing out of my head without anything to look at / paint over.

I am going to learn to use photoshop some time though.

You know who have to do a damn good animation for these guys? Hope you do that.

Yeah, that'll be the main part of the work I'll have to do. But sprites like these won't be animated too much, just the heads and arms will be moving a bit.

I'll post an smoking animation of the girl in the black t-shirt (Laura) soon..

EDIT: The good point is that I don't have to do it pixel-by-pixel, but rather change the vectors of the different bodyparts. All of them (as well as every piece of clothing) are different layers and it isn't too hard to change/animate them. But nevertheless it will be much work.

I chose a color now that is something between the other two, it's looks neither "sunburnt" nor "sickly" imo. I also added shoes and tried to shorten the arm a bit.

Additionally I played around a bit and have now some sprites for 5 of my 7 main characters. Just wanted to share, but c&c is appreciated - as always.



X 1.5

You're absolutely right about the arm. I already shortened the arm once but now that you mention it, it's indeed still wrong. I'll have that fixed, though I won't do that pixel-by-pixel cause I draw the sprites much larger (with vectors in Illustrator) and then scale them down..

Thanks.

I chose the tan-like tone now, but here are both sprites with both skintones nevertheless.

   

   

Haha, sounds like fun. And the style definitely fits the weird story..

I agree, the first color looks a little sunburnt - I think the more tan tones in the 'reclining' version of the sprite work a lot better.

Okay, it's just two votes yet  but I think I'm going for the second tone then 

Incidentally - love the sprite.

If you're interested, here's a larger, more detailed version of the first sprite.

I'm definitely looking forward to seeing more of this project - we have a sadly small number of really interesting looking mid- to high-res projects that are active.

Well, I'm currently just playing around with some sprites while working on a completely different project right now (a hi-res Action-RPG). But I'm definitely going to remake my old project. If you want to take a look, I had a GiP-Thread here.

Look at my last post..

The rocket ammunition gauge indicates you're from Germany!

Well, it's not too funny because quite a few Germans are wandering around this forum..

That's actually funny, because I'm from Germany, too.

Yeah, I thought so. "Heiko" sounds quite german  .

The Surface Drawing wouldn't allow you to put mines in FRONT of your ship, so the parallax scrolling method only works under the assumption that the largest mines are the game-relevant ones.

Yes, I'm aware of that.

Another idea would be not to "destroy" mines after they leave the playfield or collide with the player, but to just change their position back to the front. That way you could have 20 mines on screen at once, not necessarily 20 mines at all.

That's exactly what I did when making the game with Pascal... But I'm afraid 20 mines were still insufficient. Back then I used 50 mines at once and that was a good amount. I hope CJ will raise the object limit once more in the next version...

I guess you can only experiment. If you want to talk to me in German so I can explain a few things easier, mail at x-heiko@skullbyte.de

Yeah, I will see if a can get this thing to work. Thanks for the offer, it's appreciated. I'll mail you in case I get problems. On the other hand I think I won't test it soon since I'm working on another, more serious project right now. I just wanted to know if something like that minefield would be possible using the RawDraw-functions before getting into it.

Yesterday, I took a look at the link Pumaman posted. Assuming that you have only your starship and the mines (Can you shoot? Then let's just assume we have 5 projectile objects or "others"), then you can use about 30 mines without problems. The rest would be background.

Yeah, something like that. But the ship's shield, some missiles and explosions would have to be objects too I guess. But, well, I could do it with about 20 mine objects if neccessary...

In short you convert the background into a Drawing Surface, then stick a lot of little mines in the image (could even make them random) and THEN give the order to release your changes into the actual background. There is not 3000 little objects, there's just (up to) 3000 iterations where mines are being pasted into the background. You could do it even more elegant and just use layers - larger pictures with a few hundred mines each. That would mean 6 or so additional lines of code, each not much more CPU intensive than loading the BG into the video memory. Hell, you could even make ONE single background image, but then - why not just include them in the background image? Or did you mean parallax scrolling?

Ah, well, the mines in the background are supposed to move leftwards, each "layer" (there were 8 in my old game - 5 in the background, 2 in the foreground) with a different speed. Is that possible?

You can't excessively slow down the game with too many objects because their number is limited.

Yes, of course. But - if possible - I would have to draw the (non-object-) mines into the background every gamecycle in order to have them moving. I thought that could cause a slowdown..

For parallax scrolling, you could yet use another trick. Get each mine of the same size into one sprite, a big layer so to speak. Let them move with differring speeds, faster for large mines, slower for small mines. That would still only be 4-5  additional objects (I can't quite make out how many different mine sizes you've got there). If the large objects slow down too much, you could still use a refreshing algorithm in the "repeatedly execute" function, which would go something like "On every game cycle: Change the background of the room to [picture with no mines]. Make it a drawing surface. Depending on the position of the player, draw [picture with smallest mines] on (player's X coordinate / large number). Then draw [picture with second smallest mines] on (player's X coordinate / less large number). Then, Then, Then draw [picture with largest non-object mines] on (player's X coordinate / smallest number), then release the changes." The Y coordinate would have to be constant and same for all.

Yeah, I thought of something like that. I didn't quite understand everything but it sounds like it would be possible.

Ah, well, I should just check the manual and try around a bit. Thanks for the answer.. So here are some screenies of my old game, scaled down from a 1024 to a 640 resolution:





And all the mines in their original size:

I was about to ask a similar question. I was going to remake a game I started some years ago using Turbo Pascal. I had some problems and stopped the project. It's a side-scrolling space-shooter and I know that it can be done with AGS. There's just this one level where the player encounteres a minefield... with about 3000 mines shown at once (some of them are just one pixel wide). Of course the object limit doesn't allow that but most of the mines don't need to be objects since they're just background fillers to create a nice 3D-effect.

Well, I know nothing about Drawing surface thingies yet, but before I get into it I just want to know if something like the following screenshot of my old game would be possible. I'm afraid that even if it would be possible, it would be too slow...

Only the largest mines are supposed to be objects:

I'm willing to do that one but I didn't find the time yet.

But as Babar pointed out, sometimes this comp is off for weeks, so don't worry.

If there are no categories this time I'll just vote for Kastchey. It's a very funny idea and well drawn too.

Since everybody wears mike's uniform I propose the next competition is about the rival camp.

Tis a fun competition indeed, I see if I'll enter. I just have to think of yet another original character..

If it's possible in you scene, use a walkbehind to make the character disappear in the building.. and you could use an object for a door and animate it..

I don't know Corel Paint Shop Pro but perhaps I'll give it a try..

5 $ per Background?

I would greatly appreciate it if the room's object limit would be increased by 10 or 20..

For adventure games 50 objects are quite enough but for non-adventure games it sometimes isn't.