Messages

Really interesting style and background.

Intriguing...

To be perfectly honest it's not seen from inside, more from something like that : http://www.theantiqueregister.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/frontporch1.jpg
But hey, that's a good idea, I'll keep that in mind. I don't want it to look it weird if I don't add reflections on the glass.

PS: yes, the car is too small, I've noticed it the next day, after giving it a rest. The nanoying thing is that if I scale it up it will hide the street arrival, hence making the city's set (at the foot of the hills) less clear.

Oh, I've just had an idea. Maybe I can turn the building on the right into a gas station.

the area on the right is a bit of a mess in my opinion. It's hard to make out the angle of the
fence and the wooden things around it, is it supposed to be some kind of porch?

It' supposed to be some sort of Art-Deco decorative/advertising porch, yes.
Indeed it's messy.
I think the perspective will be easier to grasp when the objects are properly connected to the ground and when there's the guy for scale.

water puddle? parked car? bicycle?

No puddle in Arizona... However yes, a bicycle could be a good idea. I was thinking of putting a tram there but it would look stupid not moving.

Whoohoo, it'll be the summer of Indy! 

Not sure about that But working on it.

It's just an objective comparison point with other editors: Unlike Unity and some others, AGS doesn't offer visual programming.

Everything has been said in Snarky's and Joseph DiPerla's posts.
My two centes: For professional development, the data structures thing can be easily addressed by using the Lua plugin. However it's hard to work around concurrential (multi-users) development.

hey xil, is it the game with the engine?

[The important bits are:]

Hi all,

what you'll see below is the concept for a new background. It's only meant to work on the perspective and the scene composition.

[imgzoom]http://40.media.tumblr.com/5a97163640f97da6088708420ea8f1fd/tumblr_nrt8r445011tsfksfo1_1280.png[/imgzoom]

The important bits are:
- The hotel, right in the middle. One must be able to see that it's an important building.
- The fience on the right. It doesn't have to be a fience, just some close-up vertical surface against which an old guy (Indian) can sit, and the main character can walk close to it.
- The path to the mountains, on the right
- The fact that the "left part" of the scene (hotel+car+church) fits in 320x200 and is self-sufficient. The right part of the scene becomes visible when the character walks to the right.

All the rest is bullshit and only meant to make the scene come alive.
Come to think of it, I should turn the foreground black wooden shit into a parallax.

I'm a bit annoyed because I don't know how to occupy the space between the foreground black pole and the fience (that big gray bit of road is kind of empty).

Hurray!

Still in 2015, it's impossible for me to ever remember how the damn import/export work. The help is not clear at all. I always need to have a look et my former scripts to remember what to put in the header, in the body, etc.

Khris' suggestion is very interesting.

Another one, strictly graphical: I can see that you understand how cast shadows work. So, push it even further:
- currently you have all the bricks explicitly outlined + a yellow gradient for the light
- instead: remove the gradient AND the bricks outlines, and instead draw the bricks outlines "deeper" and deeper the further you get from the lamp. (just in front of the lamp, don't draw the outlines since the light is cast directly into the wall cracks -- away from the lap, the cracks' "black lines" are quite wide because of the full cast shadows of the bricks edges into the cracks -- even further away, stop drawing the crsks again but draw everything dark: it's as dark on the wall as it is inside the cracks)

Something like that. Keep it simple.
(pro-tip: draw the whole wall "normally" first and then use the "erase" tool to erase the wall cracks were needed)
[imgzoom]https://40.media.tumblr.com/c5fcb6700721956074d6fa33db3e976e/tumblr_nqk98hHUmO1tsfksfo1_250.png[/imgzoom]

I'm pretty excited by this. DElightfully weird, yet wonderfully crafted.

it also makes me wonder if people in 10 years from now, when there are no more loading times whatsoever will artificially slow down systems to show one of these retro circle loading gif...

That has already been done when Windows95 replaced DOS. Computers started being so fast that there was an utility called "MosLo" to slow down games and stuff.
(quick google search: this software still exists for Windows 7!!! I have no idea why someone would need something like that on Win 7)

Also don't forget to use ReleaseViewport (or something, I'm not sure from the top of my head) to unlock it afterwards when you're done.

At this stage I'd recommend uploading your game files so that we can try.

You are discussing two separate issues here:
1) The character swapping in the font file
2) the translation files and associated features (automated translation, etc.)

For issue 1, as I said, it would be better to go the WFN path rather than the SCI path.
For issue 2, I have no particular suggestion. Your ideas are cool, go with them!

For the character: something between 9 and 10 (darker inner lines, but not black  -- like, darker brown for the skin, etc.)

Too late again.

I just had an idea of a Setup AGS "game" that would open with the exact same graphical parameters as the game itself (necessarily, since they share the same config file). That would feel like these old setup.exe files from MS-DOS times, like the one of the original Command&Conquer, that was in 320x200 (if you've never seen it, search it in youtube, it's deadly!). To make it even cooler, there could be a short intro sequence to the Setup "game" where it starts with a white command prompt on a blackscreen, and a short cutscene shows the command "setup.exe" being awkwardly typed in.

It's nice you're making a tool to work around the SCI fonts limitations and automate the usual solutions, but you should read the following article, nowadays most people would probably use a WFN font, because it allows 256 characters: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/wiki/Fonts
(the solution you're describing is "the hacker's strategy")