Topics

[dialog options]

Hi all,
During Mittens I had this discussion with other forumers: Does a module enable non-blocking Sierra-style dialogs?
In other words :
- It displays the character's portrait with the line next to it
- The animations in the background (and more generally, the game loop) don't stop

The native non-blocking dialog options of AGS seem to be restricted to Lucasarts-style dialogs (no portrait).

I've been trying several "custom dialogs" modules but unless I'm mistaken they only allow you to customize your dialog options/dialog tree, but not the actual dialog (that is, when the characters speak, with their portrait visible).

[How they found silence]

Hi all,

I'll make it short:

============================

This is a remake of How they found silence.
The original game was cool and very immersive, but the graphics were very basic and I thought the game deserved a little upgrade.

All credits (except for the new graphics and scripting) go to the original game's creator, discordance.



DOWNLOAD THE DEMO (Megaupload).

SEE THE VIDEO (just a little joke, don't worry, the game will still be a drama).

EAT THE GAZPACHO









Game progress:
============
Music: 100% (ripped from  discordance) - by the way, check it out, it's brilliant.
Story: 100% (ripped from  discordance)
Dialogs: 100% (ripped from  discordance)
Graphics: 10%
Scripting: 30% (implemented a few little things like non-blocking Sierra-style dialogs).

Hey all,

What do you think of this?
I mean, in terms of quality.

In my opinion:
- The anti-alianing isn't very good
- It's rather loaded and confused.
- The colors lack some contrast in some places.

If you feel like doing a paintover to point out some specific points, then try not to add more than 10 colors (you know what I mean, no super unusable photoshoppey-thing)

The result looks good I must say!
(note: I did NOt make this tutorial)

http://beccaful.deviantart.com/#/d3d4ufx

Also, maybe you need an account on Deviant Art to view this, I have no idea. No complaints

So there's this guy who has released a first game. Let's call him "Bob". I didn't play the game so I don't know if it was good, but there was room for graphical improvement. Coincidentally, Bob starts posting pictures for a new game in the critics lounge. So here I am, contacting him and offering to help making the new game look better.

I pretty much tell him I can do anything except for animation. He answers me sending me the sprite he plans on using for the main character, and telling me "please send me back all walkcycles before xxxxx".

I'm like. "Ok, that's not very diplomatic, but eh, maybe it's just a misunderstanding".

So I answer explaining I can't do animations.

Bob almost immediately starts talking about a new new game (out of the blue), and keeps on giving immediate directions even though nothing has been discussed yet.

I tell Bob I'll check out the background of that new game (never heard the name before) and then contact him back.

That was on Friday night.
I don't have the Internet during the week end.
This morning (Monday) I check my email and sees an email from Bob telling me that he knew I was a fraud, and if I was really interested in the project I'd have sent material already. He concluded his mail with "do not contact me again."


FOR THE LULZ.

PS: Not posting this as a "revenge", obviously, as I didn't give the actual name of the guy or the name of his game. Just thought it was a funny story that would make you smile on a Monday morning.

When the player selects Direct3D, is "System.HardwareAcceleration" always true?

...and...

When the player selects DirectDraw5, is "System.HardwareAcceleration" always false?

[Google Sketchup]

The point here is to present the best compromise between speed and quality, for those who're too scared of (or can't afford) 3D programs and/or Photoshop.

- Google Sketchup for the super quick and user-friendly modelling
- Kerkythea for the photo-realistic rendering (fully integrated to SketchUp)
- CubicPanoOut.rb for the panorama generation (also easily integrated into SketchUp

BOOM! There you go, a fully-featured production pipeline to start creating loads of cool panoramas for the Panorama3D module/plugin. All of it very fast and very easily.

["ags_theora" plugin]

- If I'm not mistaken, the "ags_theora" plugin doesn't take the transparent color in account.
- I've asked the AGDi team how they did their transparent videos in KQ1, 2 and 3. They said they're actually imported frame by frame (even though they'd use the tiled import, it's not the ideal solution because it allows only short videos and  I guess it uses a lot of resources (possibly RAM)).

Are there any other alternatives?

I wonder if the Dawrf ever steals stuff from you in that version -- just so that I avoid being stressed everytime I see him appear, and worry about not being able to finish the game because I'm missing an object.

Step 1: Purchase any pixellated piece of clothe ( http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/hats-ties/9352/ )
Step 2: take pictures of yourself in clunky positions for the walkcycle (so that yourself look like some piece of pixel-art)
Step 3: Make a game.

Easy, isn't it?

This continues the "Suggestion: Web engine" thread and broadens the paradigm.

At the moment the engine is not open source, only the Editor. That's fine. That's one thing.
Another thing: More and more people are pushing to have it work on several media, from Consoles to Web Browsers, etc. We have seen XAGE and even a Javascript proof-of-concept.
At the moment that forces them to rewrite everything from scratch. Then you have another AGS that's not AGS.

However, IF we assume that the engine goes open source...

...then I think one of the main things to do would be to gradually isolate the core engine from the rendering engine. Let's say, make AGS a DLL (that's just an example to make it clearer). That "DLL" would be in charge of the walk area calculations, inventory, dialogs, etc. But there wouldn't be any graphical output.

That way, you could then easily expand it back into several rendering engines, each using their own tehcnology/platform. That would really create opportunities for parallel coding: While some people would fix the core and expand the script language or whatever, some others would maintain the Web-browser plugin or the Xbox engine or the Hardware-accelarated-related details of the rendering, etc.

That already kind of exists as plugins, but the goal here would be to make pretty much everything from the core accessible easily and fast by the rendering engine, and also not to mix up the 2 sides.

I'm just throwing an idea. It might be the wrong forum. I apologize in advance if you think that's irrelevant or silly or doesn't make any sense, technically.


then again I'm really only posting this because I see so many people all frisky about "porting" AGS to pretty much anything that has a chip in it, but missing the "important" point, which in my opinion is the rendering entangled with the engine.

I was watching the animation movie "The illusionist", and I realized that it would be SO easy to rip off all the backgrounds (including their animations) and all the characters.

Provided you have the DVD, everything is incredibly high quality and suits perfectly the point-n-click genre.
You'd easily have complete walkcycles (from every angles) for at least 3 or 4 characters.

Excerpts here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZElAeVdDCDs&feature=related

Hi all,

Once again, a rather gloomy (yet luminous) background. You should hear the wind blowing when watching that picture.
It will be animated, so that the rays of light appear and disappear slowly.

I also plan on adding birds in the distant sky.

If someone feels like animating the sea, then please be my guest as I suck at this.

And of course, post your critics. I've taken in account previous critics about both the sky (to avoid it looking like a mountain) and the way I render distant grass (so that it doesn't look like trees).

[TUTORIAL]

Hi all,

There are 2 very common issues for Low-res artists (and artists in general) :
1/ The scenes lack contrast.
2/ The colors nerver seem to be right. They're aeither too dull or too "shiny". It's either all gray or it looks like it's Disneyland.

Here is a little tutorial I wrote for a fellow artist, and Dualname asked me to release a tutorial by coincidence just the same day. So here it is.
The "you" in the tutorial could be YOU! It's the first FPT (First-Person-Tutorial )


============================

TUTORIAL

Hey!
You already draw great scenes. They have a good composition, good color schemes. They just lack a bit of polish, and they lack contrast.

This kind-of-tutorial is specially meant for you, to adapt to your drawing process and style.

1/ Draw you scene black on white, defining the big volumes.
No antialiasing. Make sure your perspective is all good. Don't bother with details like buttons and stuff.



2/ Define the shading.
You can use colors, but it doesn't really matters at this stage. What you want to do is really have a good vision of cast shadows. Take every single light of source into consideration, even lamps, etc.
What you're missing here: Get rid of the black outlines. It'll still be possible to draw them over  again later if needed.


(At first just fill the shapes AND add the shadows in the same step!)


(then -- or at the same time) get rid of the black outlines)

If you've done that part well, your scene should look realistic seen from afar, but hard to read from close (because of the lack of details and clear contrast despite the cartoony style)

3/ Choose your tones
You're good at choosing the general color of an object (this should be blue, this should be green, etc.)
You're also good at using not-too-staurated colors (so that it doesn't look like Disneyland)

What you could improve: Even though it's good to use unsaturated colors, keep in mind that a gray is never really just gray, or a black is never really just black. Never use gray or black or white. Always tint them, to make them look warmer. In the image below, the wall is slightly brown. It's gray but it's brown!


(the box is green-ish, and the wall is brown-ish)

What you're missing here: To draw the darker part of an object, or its lighter parts, using the "luminosity slide" is not enough!!! A dark brown will not "just" be a dark brown. You'll see that in the next step.


4/ Use much more saturated colors for your light parts and dark parts.
Leave the mid-tones unsaturated. That you did in the previous step. It's all good.

But you look closely in the image below you'll see I increased the saturation of the darker green, and of the darker brown (without touching the rest).



What you're missing here : Tell the superiority of     over  
- The middle color has not changed.
- The darker and lighter colors are more saturated, but the luminosity is the same (the dark doesn't look darker, the light doesn't look lighter))


When you're experienced you can do steps 2, 3 and 4 at once.


5/ Add highlights/outlines (apply your very own, manual pixel shading)

Outlines should not be all black or all white. They should follow the guidelines of step 4.

That will help :
- making the scene easier to read (slightly cartoony)
- Defining the material of objects (shiny? Matte? etc.)

That's also when you start using alialiasing like a crazy man, to make it all look sexier :-) But keep it at a mininum, to keep the sharp effect and not to make the scene look blurry.



============================

For short, the goal of the tutorial is to reach that kind of enhancements :




(the 2 images below did NOT follow this tutorial and were not made by me, but I think they illustrate pretty well the "outlines" and "warm black" parts)

Hi,

Please let me know what you think.

I don't like that it's all "waxy" but I'm not good enough to make details (especially cliffs and grass) look sharper.
I think there's a good contrast and the colors are not dull despite the gloomy atmosphere.

My dream would be to animate the waves but I'm also too bad for that. I'll just leave it still. The whole game is very static anyway.

[Comments]

Let me know what you think.



Comments
- It's not very detailed because it appears only briefly in the introduction sequence, not in-game. I didn't want to spend too much time on it.
- The sea is not very realitic, because in the game it's animated (going up and down) so the eye doesn't really stay on it.
- I think it lacks contrast overall, but at the same time I want it to be slightly misty, so I don't really know what to do.

Hi!
This is a really silly question... But I was wondering what are the steps to set up Sierra dialogs with a GUI background?
I'd say :
1- Go to the game's "General settings" and enable Speech style = Sierra with background
2- Go to the character and add a speech View. That will be used as his portrait

...But how to you choose the background GUI that will appear behing the portrait and the dialog line when the character speaks?

Additional questions :
- What's the best "queued speech" module on the market at the moment? (I'd like to have a cinematic continue running while the characters speak because there is a scripted animation int he background). I'd say this one. Am I right?
- What's the best "fancy dialogs interface" module on the market at the moment? (you know, to have custom  dialog options and custom dialogs display). I'd say this one. Am I right?

Hi all,
I'm contributing to the next game by Technocrat by drawing this background.
What do you think? Do you see any big issue with it?



Please note that the graphics have to stay rather simple with a good contrast, to maintain the overall consistency accross artist, and to maintain a rather readable scene.

It's upposed to be some sort of high-tech cell. I think I drew it a bit oo clean, but I don't want to overload it with stains everywhere. (or at least not too much).

Well, anyway, tell me what you think needs improvement.

Sorry, you already all know that, and you'll find it strange that I post it now, for strictly no reason.

But this music makes me in such a good mood right now!
I feel like I can just see that silly werewolf prince doing even-more-silly stuff.

So, it will be a good occasion for the few who've never heard that soundtrack to do it NOW :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I015-Ym03mA&feature=related

It's just the perfect example of how a soundtrack can match the characters and the universe of the game.

[not]

I suggest this competition - it's not meant to replace or compete with the regular writing competition, but the occasion was too good!

Read this :

From the AGS anonymous usage stats (I knew they'd come in handy one day!) I can tell you that 88% of AGS users already have 3.5 installed. 12% don't, which is 300 people that would have to upgrade their framework version.

However, of these 300 people, 10 are still using Windows 2000 on which .NET 3.5 is not supported. That would mean that those 10 people could no longer use AGS.

Therefore, if we take the decision to go to 3.5 it's something that we should consider carefully rather than just make on a whim. So for this AGS version I'd like to stick with .NET 2.0, but I'm certainly open to moving to 3.5 for the next version (3.2.2 or whatever), unless those 10 people come up with a heart-wrenching story of the problems it would cause them to no longer be able to use new versions.

So, what's YOUR reason for not upgrading from Windows 2000 to Windows XP?
I want tears and emotions!