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when you're in there, chances are you're going to be in there for a few thousand years.

Interesting idea

BOOO you had time from feb 26 to make a bg

I've been trying but I never had time

Hey is it possible to have a few more days? Pretty please.

No, no, no....  You're supposed to guess and ask a question, thereby slowly unravelling the mystery.

Btw, no.

Pi from The Life of Pi.
Is he human? Boy or girl?

It sounds awful, whatever it is!

Lol. Good spirit.

Wait wait wait. What?
I come here and I discover that now, Icey can draw like a pro, he can make sentences that actually mean something, and he doesn't misspell anymore?
Amazing. *impressed*

You're very good at drawing anatomy and body parts, including hands, I must say.

background animation

What do you mean by that? Animated backgrounds, or animations that run "in the background" while your player is doing other things?

Lua for Ags is a very cool topic, but isn't it a bit overkill for a newcomer?

[Just to be clear: I'm not talking about art tutorials, or tutorials about "how to make a good game", but only tutorials about "what screws you up when you start making a game, that you could have avoided if someone had told you".]

In late 2008, densming made this very cool series of tutorial videos, revolving around the main AGS features (inventory, baselines, etc.), explaining and illustrating each concept.
Before that, there was this very cool written series of tutorials that can be found in the documentation. It's also a step-by-step guide to get acquainted with all main AGS features.

What is still lacking, though, is a guide to best practices.

Professional game makers, or the elders that have been around forever, acquire that knowledge progressively, and by the time they know the tricks, they either find them obvious (hence suppressing the need of sharing them) or too busy (with a company to run).

Noticeable exceptions are tips/tutorials such as the ones of SkyGoblin, Dave Gilbert, and also Grundislav (& Ben304)'s podcasts. Sorry if I'm forgetting someone.

However there are many down-to-earth topics and best practices (perspective, scene composition, character scaling, fonts ripping, scene lighting, you name it!) that are often missed by beginners, and are then learned in blood and tears.

Some day I'd like to address those in a series of videos, each focusing on one essential topic, like densming's ones.

What do you think should be those topics? Just to be clear: I'm not talking about art tutorials, or tutorials about "how to make a good game", but only tutorials about "what screws you up when you start making a game, that you could have avoided if someone had told you".

Spoiler

A typical example: When you draw your very first side-view walkcycle ever, you don't know that the character's head should be a few pixels lower twice per loop. And then it looks crappy. And then you go to Critics Lounge, and you get told to do it -- it's like a tradition that has been here since before the dawn of times.

[close]

A list of raw ideas :
- What color depth and resolution for my game?
- Should I use plugins and modules? Why? (custom load/save, verbcoin/BASS/etc.)
- (related to the one above) How to achieve the most common visual special effects? (rain, flashes, overlays, tinted characters, etc.)
- How to successfully integrate many third-party modules?
- Tricks to successfully do pixel-art with Photoshop (there's a lot to tell about that)
- How do I make my game not awfully generic (e.g. : changing the basic fonts -- the thing that nobody bothers doing)
- How to animate a character and successfully export and import files
- What graphical file formats to use?
- How to do collaborative work?
- More generally : how to scale up a project?
- I'm terrible at animating: Should I rip walkcycles from classic games? How?
- What perspective should I use in my rooms?

Yeah, I meant "please don't drop the porting", not "please don't drop VS". Do as you wish with VS, especially if it helps cross-platform programming. Snarky's comment is interesting.

I meant SnowRainPS 1.0, not 0.5. My comment is still valid Share the SnowRainPS tricks in the SnowRainPS thread!

Nice!
Oh god oh god oh god only 3 days left. Actually two, since I have to work on Sunday. Oh god.

Rule of thumb : AGS games often start as 16-bits or 24-bits. Change them immediately to 32-bits and reimport all the graphics (cursors, gui buttons, etc.). You'll save yourself a lot of trouble later. Trust me.

That's really pretty, lots of atmosphere, original style.
Out of sheer curiosity: Marion, how did you generate the graphics? I know that you're very creative with ripping some existing graphics from comics, etc. (I'm still impressed by how you totally hacked the Ultima Online graphics to make a Harry Potter game -- and it worked!)
So, is this from a comic, or did you find a skilled artist (yourself?) to generate those?

monkey, did you consider showing this to the ALX author? Maybe he'll take it in account and clean up his own code, hence removing the need for you to work on that.

Or, like CW suggested :

You could maybe do a pull request to ALX, and then have it as a submodule to your own projects.

Oh, and Visual Studio is terrible. I'm on the verge of abandoning it because of its horrific implementation of the C++ standard.

Please don't

I'm surprised that the walkthrough didn't mention the remote. Is it the walkthrough I wrote?
EDIT: I edited the walkthrough just to be sure.

I feel the need to point out that I argued the same thing in the earlier discussion I linked to...

I'm using this one with v3.2. It works in both DD & D3D.
It may lag a bit when skipping cutscenes but this seems to get rid of it:

Code: ags

function repeatedly_execute_always()
{ 
    if (!Game.SkippingCutscene){ps.RenderParticles();}
}

If you're talking about  SnowRainPS v0.5, then maybe you should post your tips into the thread of that module.

Sixty nine! Anyway you look at it! Sixty nine!

Wyz gave very good advice (good practice, and it would actually make it easier).

However it depends on what you're trying to achieve. Did you want the mySQL database locally, to store some game data?