Messages

I've worked my ass off on this sprite (because I'm a bad sprite artist)

The right-hand sprite was the good one, but... it turned out that it was too small.
--> So I made the left-hand-side sprite.

(left: AFTER       right:BEFORE)


The face on the left-hand-side sprite might need some rework. But overall I'm happy with the proportions of the body (slightly beefy to look like Indy).

[I'm now thinking of implementing a small Editor plugin]

I'm thinking of something for our very own project. My idea fits right in for our project's scale, and is simple to implement BUT still I think it's better to listen to every AGSer's opinion before I do it. Maybe someone has a much better idea.

    - our graphics is on a versioned repository (Dropbox at the moment, but could be anything), sync'ed to a local folder on each of our hard drives (C:\Dropbox or whatever)
    - we do bulk import of sprites for animations.
    - if the animation needs to be changed, we re-export the sprites in bulk from the painting program,...
    - ...then inside AGS we do "re-import from source".

As you know, the thing with AGS sprites is that AGS stores an absolute path to them.
To make sure there would be no mistakes with the path, we created a folder "X:", using either Network folders, or a subst command. That folder actually points to the Dropbox folder (C:\Dropbox or whatever) This way the path is the same on every contributor's computer, and he doesn't mess up our sprites directories structure when importing his own sprites. When we import or reimport sprites, it's always from X:\something

I'm now thinking of implementing a small Editor plugin that would check if drive X: exists before importing sprites. If not, it would reconnect it, using the path to the Dropbox folder. This is to make sure that none of the team members imports sprites from some random, unsync'ed location.

What says you?

Considering how talented you look, if you're asking for "do you think the final result will look weird?", then the answer is: "no, it won't look weird, it will rock".
Having said that, the dithering in the Frankenstein picture is sort of missing the point, because it's almost invisible since the resolution is very high.
Some time ago I posted the link to some dithering plugins for Photoshop: Quantizer and Color Dither. They're not free, unfortunately, but you can toy around, testing several error dispersion methods and values.

Regarding hte B&W low-res sprite, yes, I'd like to see a colored version, to be sure of what you mean. I'm not sure how you plan on "adding depth" with dithering, because it seems to me that, at such a low resolution, it's just plain old dithering.

I'm reasonably certain that the engine does write a warning to the log file if this happens, but that might not be very obvious... I think that the editor raising a warning (not an error -- e.g., it won't prevent compilation) would be a good idea in this case.

Well, considering AGS fails to render a 32-bits image into a 16-bits surface, and produces an unpredictable result, I think an error wouldn't be a problem.

This sounds like another occurance of this bug: (...)

The AGS is clearly lacking "on_exit" event handler...

Thanks for the info! I never had that issue Probably it's because I'm old school and always click on my own internal "quit" button Old reflexes from Windows 3.11
If I didn't know you and other C++ wizards are so busy already (and even officially retired ), I'd say: "Let's add that event to The AGS!"

Formica I'm not sure how familiar you are with AGS, but I smell something fishy with the way you (or the module) manages sprites.

Apparently AGS crashes at "quitgame" time because there is still a sprite floating around, and that's usually the sign of a DynamicSprite not properly deleted, or deleted too early! It should be automated, but I suggest you try calling ".Delete()" on every DynamicSprite you created manually in your script.

Are you sure you removed everything from the module? For example, are you sure you also removed the function in charge of deleting the snapshot sprite? Maybe it's still there, trying to delete it when it doesn't actually exist anymore.

I HAVE PLANS FOR THIS OBSOLETE TECH!

Me too Why do you think I wrote this? I hope we don't have the same secret plan

Do you have any plans to speed it up even more via the Lua plugin?

Nope. I love the Lua plugin, but this is meant for people who don't use plugins. If you use the Lua plugin, I suppose you wouldn't even need that shit, considering all the libraries that exist in Lua.

There have been an awful lot of great remakes made with AGS:
- several king's quest, VGA version (I,II,III...?)
- Maniac mansion deluxe
- dott high resolution (just started)
- maniac mansion dott style (still in the making, very likely to be released)
- several space quest (space quest I being at beta test phase)
- several quest for glory, if i'm not mistaken.

I think it would be cool to have a page on the forums showcasing those, to show AGS newcomers that, if they came here for the nostalgia thing, then AGS is not just a toy. It's powerful enough for them to do the same as Ron Gilbert or Roberta Williams.

thanks for reporting the issue here, CW. I just posted in the sticky "bugs" thread as well, and then i saw your post.

[- The everlasting Bug tracker permissions bug :]

Some things that should be fixed:

- The everlasting Bug tracker permissions bug : I cannot see the bugs in the bug tracker. According to CW, it's because I'm a member of several groups in the AGS forum (AGSA and others), and there is a bug.

- The hypertext button not taking in account the highlighted text: in any forum, when you highlight a text, then click on the "hypertext link" button, the website uses that text as the capion, and only asks you for the url. not the AGS forum: it asks you for both url and caption, then inserts the whole hypertext link immediately before the text that was highlighted. 99% of times you end up typing the text twice and having to manually delete the highlighted text afterwards.

- The formatting buttons deselecting the highlighted text. Try this: highlight some text, then click on "bold" or "italic". The tags get properly inserted, but then the text gets deselected. That's utterly annoying when you want to apply several formatting tags in a row (e.g.: url after color, color after bold). Each time, you have to re-select the text. That's not the usual behaviour on most sites.

Hi arj0n,

I'd be interested. I'm not familiar with LSL1 -- I mean, I know the LSL universe and ompleted several of the later ones, but not LSL1. I can playtest or beta test.

I'm taking the liberty to dig up this thread, so that anyone who might stumble across it by googling be aware that there is something more recent to do the same : Version 2.0 http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=51142.msg636498255#msg636498255
(that's almost a brand new module now, so I created a new thread)

[WHAT DOES IT DO]

Hi everyone,

WHAT DOES IT DO
AGS can already easily read and write to BMP files-- it can read any color depth, and writes to 32bpp (or maybe the game's color depth? I'm not sure).
BUT this module allows you to have more control over your BMP files. More specifically, it manages 8bpp files, including the palette. Also, it has a flood-fill function that was written by SSH.

This is all obsolete tech, but it can come handy for mad scientists who want to generate 8bpp files from within a game -- this color depth is compatible with the mask files that AGS uses for walk areas, walkbehinds, etc.

Eye candy: there is an automated progress bar for all slow operations.

CREDITS
- version 2.0 by monsieur ouxx
- version 1.1 by SSH (I created a new module thread because it's almost a whole new module now).

DEMO



>> Download here (version 2.0) <<

Oh, my! This is sooo tempting!

I think it is another variant of this bug in AGS:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?issue=362.0

For the record, "regular" people cannot see the bug tracker. I can't.

[EDIT: Forget it.]

Hi people,

I don't know if it's generally accepted that the engine should succeed with loading only files that have the same colors-depth as the current game. But just in case. Here is a small test to reproduce the issue :

1. Open MS Paint, create some random drawing.
2. Save it as a 24-bits BMP (name it "bmp24.bmp", for example). Save it again as a 256-colors BMP (name it "bmp8.bmp").
3. CReate a 32-bits game in AGS. Put the BMP files in its "compiled" folder.
4. Go to the "room after fade-in" script and add this :

Code: ags

  DrawingSurface* ds = Room.GetDrawingSurfaceForBackground();
  DynamicSprite* s = DynamicSprite.CreateFromFile("bmp8.bmp"); //...or bmp24.bmp, as you wish.
  ds.DrawImage(0, 0,  s.Graphic);
  ds.Release();

You'll see that the images are unproperly rendered.
Just sayin'. (it's not vital, but it would have saved me some trouble with a module I'm currently writing, that reads and writes 8-bits BMP files, to work with the AGS feature that loads walkbehinds/Walkareas/etc. masks from 8-bits files)

EDIT: Forget it. Every time I get pawned by the same old trick: The game was 32-bits, but the 9-verb template's sample background was still 16-bits. Hence the issues. After I exported it and re-imported it, effectively turning it into a 32-bits background, everything went fine.
That said, the "DrawImage" function might want to throw an error when the source and target sprites don't have the same color depth. OR The Editor might want to throw warnings for every sprite in the game that doesn't have the same color depth as the game itself.

That's a good idea. I hope you will complete it.

Really cool polished and professional feel. Everything is clean and trippy. The gameplay is awful, but that's how it's meant to be in every Outrun clone. The genre demands it   -- in its category, this game is excellent!

Not bad but you made the beginner's mistake: the head is not moving up and down. BAsically there should be two frames where the head is lowered a bit (each time the foot hits the floor)